BrightSign 4K digital signage players to support MPEG-DASH

April 8, 2014

Digital signage media player provider BrightSign LLC announced today that its new 4K digital signage media players will support MPEG-DASH, which enables streaming of media content over the Internet. The company also announced it will be demonstrating its 4K players at NAB 2014 in Las Vegas in the Elemental Technologies and Tightrope Media Systems booths.

BrightSign CEO Jeff Hastings said in the announcement, "4K opens up so many possibilities in digital signage and other industry applications, but it's important to understand and avoid the potential pitfalls of a wrongly deployed 4K system. As BrightSign continues to expand into the 4K market, we are working with a wider range of partners and demonstrating new technology for supporting the 4K ecosystem at NAB."

According to BrightSign, MPEG-DASH is critical when it comes to broadcasting 4K content via the Internet. The protocol takes content from standard HTTP servers and separates that content into individual segments, enabling network bandwidth optimization in real time for maximum streaming efficiency. Efficiencies are maximized because the highest possible bit-rate segment will be streamed at any given time, depending on the network resources available at that time. And because network resources fluctuate constantly, MPEG-DASH continuously evaluates those resources to maximize playback quality, without causing stalls or requiring re-buffering, the company said.

"BrightSign and Elemental are like-minded in their pursuit of 4K in its purest, most impressive form," Elemental CMO Keith Wymbs said in the announcement. "Our ongoing interoperability work with BrightSign has yielded a complete 4K solution for digital signage, and we expect BrightSign's new players to catalyze growth in the marketplace as it shifts to 4K."

This past weekend BrightSign also demonstrated its latest 4K video technology at the JB&A Video Workflow pre-NAB Event. BrightSign demonstrated its new 4K player with H.265 encoding and HDMI 2.0 for playback at 60 fps. Additionally, BrightSign said its players power 4K demonstrations in several NAB booths, including Elemental Technologies and Tightrope Media Systems.